The Vampire Book of the Month Club by Rusty Fischer Read Free Book Online Page B

hot chai tea, and nutmeg filling the air. The hum of informed, energetic conversation trills from most tables, while the rest feature solitary keyboard-tapping caffeine jockeys like me.
    I always come to the Hallowed Grounds café when it’s time to write another chapter. My room is too small, and the dorm suite phone is always ringing if Abby’s not there, or she’s gabbing on it if she is.
    Here I’m not Nora Falcon, best-selling author, but just another anonymous face bathed in the blue glow from my laptop monitor. Here I can be anyone I want to be. A high school senior, filling out applications for Harvard or Yale. A sexy (OK, not-so-sexy) single, writing up my profile for some online dating site. An irate customer, shooting off a profanity-laced complaint to the Hallowed Grounds corporate website. Or, considering my 90210 zip code, just another struggling writer, typing up a screenplay between waitressing gigs.
    I enjoy the anonymity while nibbling on an almond biscotti and searching for the next scene.
    I have no idea what’s going to happen to Scarlet now that she’s falling through the air with no net or hero to save her.
    That’s just the problem. I never do.
    Either I’ll figure out a way for her to survive the fall just before she lands in the wet, smelly alley below—or I’ll go back and do a rewrite.
    Unfortunately, I’ve been doing more rewriting than writing lately, which could be why my publisher keeps hounding me to deliver the fifth installment in the Better off Bled series.
    I stare at the half-empty page, envious of the other writers scattered around me; their fingers seem to always be flying, their heads always down, writing with purpose and passion.
    The way I used to do.
    Back then I’d been just another vannabe, a freshman in Barracuda Bay High School, entering writing contest after writing contest with my crazy stories about Scarlet Stain and her archenemy, the evil vampire Count Victus.
    We didn’t have a computer at home (insert commiserating aw s here), so I’d get to school early, stay late, and even eat lunch in front of my favorite monitor in the computer lab: the last one all the way to the right.
    I’d type and type and type and type. The lab administrator in his glass-walled office, a plump guy by the name of Mr. Mason, would shake his head in marvel as he downed another donut.
    Nothing came of it, not a penny, not a ribbon, not a prize, until one day I got a call from the folks at Hemoglobin Press, the premiere publisher of fang fiction, otherwise known as vampire literature.
    Months earlier I’d entered one of their contests, overlooking the fact that the first prize was a book contract from the publisher—and never in a million years expected to win.
    But I did win, and everything changed.
    Practically overnight.
    Months later the first Scarlet Stain book was published. It took off like fresh hotcakes on a winter morning, and the rest is history.
    My mom, a struggling waitress at the time, had heard about Nightshade Academy in one of her gossip magazines—that all the stars’ kids and all the smart and talented and beautiful kids went there. She was convinced that it was the right place for a girl like me.
    So after I made enough from the first Better off Bled book to get her out of the trailer park and into a big house in the nicest part of town, she signed me up and shipped me off.
    That was freshman year, and I haven’t been home since. The feeling I get from Mom and her new husband, Ronald, is that they’d rather see my monthly checks than little old me.
    Fine by me.
    Mom always said I was “just another mouth to feed” anyway; now I can feed Ronald and her via long distance, and everyone—including me—is happy.
    But along with the very adult freedoms of making my own money and living away from home with all the beautiful people at Nightshade Academy came very adult pressure: the need